Information Science

By positioning Jessical Yellin within a ring of high definition cameras, they were able to simultaneously shoot her body from different angles and beam that information into the CNN studios. At that point, other cameras took over and replicated her image and audio in real time.

And she even has that sort of sheen around her you'd expect holograms to have. After all, Star Wars told us they'd be shiny.

The possibilites for such technology are wide open, but think of this. I need to see an object in a museum or library in New York, but I'm in Arizona. So they put that object within a similar set up and beam the information over. Now that's a new and interesting kind of interlibrary loan.

<a href="http://www.maintainitproject.org ">MaintainIT </a>Cookbook, "Planning for Success" is on the horizon. This free online resource brings together current ideas and best practices for planning, building, and managing your library’s computer technology. Librarians around the country have contributed their knowledge on topics ranging from security solutions and strategic maintenance practices to community experiences involving Web 2.0 tools and vital partnerships.
For the next month they will be hosting a cornucopia of free webinars to showcase the new materials—from 20-minute introductions to one hour topic specific discussions. Join us for these learning experiences:
<b>Tasty Tidbits from the New MaintainIT Cookbook: A Free Introductory Webinar</b>
20 Samples in 20 Minutes:
10/29/2008 9:30am - 9:50am Pacific Register: http://tinyurl.com/5n7llw
10/29/2008 10:00am - 10:20am Pacific Register: http://tinyurl.com/5aboo3
<b>Get Your Game On - Quick Tips to Start a Gaming Program in Your Library</b>
10/29/2008 11:00 am-12:00 Pacific Register: http://tinyurl.com/69an7m
<b>Recycling and Refurbishing Old Computers: A Free Webinar for Libraries</b>
This webinar is being offered twice! Just register for the time that works best for you.
10/30/2008 9:00am - 10:00am Pacific Register: http://tinyurl.com/6duwsw
10/30/2008 1:00pm - 2:00pm Pacific Register: http://tinyurl.com/6okn4w
<b>Web 2.0 Collaboration Tools and Libraries</b>
11/3/2008 2:00-3:00 PM Eastern Register: http://tinyurl.com/64b2qs

Turns out that the metamaterial used for this cloak might also have implications for the future of the online world. Tonnes of data is transmitted every second by light waves in fibre optic cables. When these light waves get where they're going, they have to be spread out and processed by bulky equipment. In the grand scheme of computing, this is a fairly slow process.

It could be sped up. Now if only there were something capable of spreading large amounts of light around it, kind of like the materials you'd need to make an invisibility cloak.

While it may seem odd to note today compared to perhaps 1996 or 1997, a new search engine launched today. Cuil is a search engine focusing more on analyzing text relevance over ranking pages as might Google. Reactions seen on Twitter today were mixed such as those heard from Chad Haefele, Karin Dalziel, and Engadget's soon to be Editor-at-Large Ryan Block.
CNET's Rafe Needleman wrote at his WebWare site about the launch and how it was not the best. Needleman's post showed screenshots of strange results returned by Cuil. Dalziel also linked to a screenshot she posted on Flickr.
Have you tried Cuil today? What is your reaction to the launch of this new search engine?

Locative information is one of the most practical and heavily used aspects of information science. iPhone users are showing up on Twitter with new apps allowing their iPhone to pinpoint where they are and seek out others using the system. Lots of us use GPS to get around and I don't know about you, but the last conference I went to, my GPS was incredibly useful. Not only could I get around, but I could find bars, restaurants, bookstores, and anything else I needed.

The problem is, GPS only works on the Earth... which could be an issue if we're thinking about going back to the moon.

Now granted the moon is only about a quarter of the size of Earth, but you could still get lost pretty easily and it's not like there's anyone about to ask for directions. So NASA needs a plan... and it turns out that they have one.

Kathryn Greenhill Wonders Should academic libraries be obsessing so much about teaching the discovery of resources? Should we turn more attention to teaching the evaluation of resources ? Is it encroaching on what academics should be doing as part of their course? Should schools have already taught them this by the time they set foot in our libraries? It’s definitely beyond our traditional brief, but given that we no longer have a monopoly on the best discovery tools, is it time we sold the library as a place that has value because there are smart people who can give you personalised help to evaluate your information needs and the resources you find?

In the world of broadcast news, it's normally a given courtesy that, when a well known news personality dies, the station they worked for will be the first to break the news after the family has been notified. It's one of the unwritten rules of journalism.

Turns out that a minor lackey at the station heard the news and, assuming it was public knowledge, edited Russert's Wikipedia page to reflect the death. Someone at the station caught it, which makes me wonder who they pay to watch Wikipedia, and changed it back some eleven minutes later.

Too late.

By the time they made the changes, the story was already out on Twitter.

On a fog-drizzled Monday afternoon, this fading medieval city feels like a forgotten place. Apart from the obligatory Gothic cathedral, there is not much to see here except for a tiny storefront museum called the Mundaneum, tucked down a narrow street in the northeast corner of town. It feels like a fittingly secluded home for the legacy of one of technology’s lost pioneers: Paul Otlet.

In 1934, Otlet sketched out plans for a global network of computers (or “electric telescopes,” as he called them) that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even congregate in online social networks. He called the whole thing a “réseau,” which might be translated as “network” — or arguably, “web.”

A little history lesson for those out there in library land who don't know who Dr. Douglas Engelbart is. Engelbart gave the world a couple things that we, as library professionals, use every day. He invented a small device capable of positioning a cursor in an X-Y display environment. We call such a device a computer mouse. He also created an interesting technology that allowed the linkage of information to a given word displayed on a computer screen, in other words, hypertext.

Then there's his idea that we'd call Windows, the video conferencing idea, his notion about e-mail, and something called copy and paste.

He displayed and explained these ideas at a demonstration in 1968 which came to be called "The Mother of All Demos." Watch the video over at Google and see how our world changed forever.